What you're seeing now is the result of a failed economic policy by a president who has been in office three years and is looking for someone to blame.

12.59pm: Richard Trumka, president of the AFL-CIO umbrella group of leading unions isn't too impressed either. But at least he's on Obama's side. He says the loss of public sector jobs, most of them teachers, has made the situation worse.

Our nation's leaders should require no further evidence of the need to pass the President's American Jobs Act than the September jobs numbers. Though the net gain of 103,000 jobs in September is a positive sign, it remains far too weak to provide any real relief for working families...

The solutions to put our economy back on track are not fiscal austerity, bad trade deals and cuts to core middle class programs like Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. We have real solutions at hand: Putting people to work to fix our roads, bridges, schools, transit and other basic national systems that also need work; providing aid to states to prevent the layoffs that are dragging down the economy; directly hiring people who need work in hard-hit local communities; and investing in our manufacturing to make things in America again.

All across America, working people are expressing their frustration – and anger – about our country's staggering wealth gap, the lack of work for people who want to work and the corrupting of our politics by business and the financial elites on Wall Street. For the 99 percent of us, consequences of these cynical political games are resulting in some of the worst inequality and joblessness of our time. Communities of color are facing a nearly unprecedented economic crisis. It's time to value and strengthen the middle class and turn our back on 30 years of failed economic policies that produced record economic inequality, stagnant wages, and the current economic crisis.

2.02pm: Hi, Dominic Rushe here in New York, picking up the business blog as we move into the final hours of trading on Wall Street.

It's been another wild week. Markets have risen for three days in a row amid encouraging signs that the economy is at least stabilising.

2.12pm: My colleague Simon Rogers has mapped out which states have been hardest hit by unemployment. California, Michigan, Nevada and South Carolina are all a threatening shade of claret - almost like dried blood - and are the US's biggest losers.

2.18pm: Obama's critics are all weighing in on the jobs numbers, which are actually not too depressing. At least unemployment isn't rising.

This is another downgrade of EU leaders. Germany & France need to urge the ECB to act before they too get caught in this downward spiral. There is little doubt that these will make the perceived problems of EU banks even worse.

While the recapitalization of some EU banks may be necessary, it's not sufficient. Unless the borrowing costs for Italy and Spain are brought down soon, all bets are off. The downgrades will hopefully focus the minds of EU policy-makers and get them to focus on lowering the borrowing costs for Italy and Spain as an urgent priority.

2.50pm: Those of you who have been worried about how Wall Street is holding up with markets flip flopping and all those hipster hippies and grannies holding court on their lawns, need fear no longer. Jamie Dimon, JP Morgan's boss, has apparently found a new pot of gold in these troubled times: rich people.

According to the New York Post the bank is planning to add hundreds of branches catering to wealthier clients in Texas, California and Florida over the next several years. The rich you will always have with you, as Jesus said. Oh sorry, the poor you will always have with you. My mistake.

Roberts points out that the long-term trends in employment have been bad for a decade and that these latest figures are hardly good news.

The economic environment is substantially weaker than the headline numbers. The number of people who are 'marginally attached' doing part-time work because they have to actually rose from 16.2% to 16.4%. The jobs that are being created are service jobs, delivering pizza, working part-time in retail. We need manufacturing jobs.

3.24pm: Some reaction is coming in from Fabrizio Saccomanni, director general of the Bank of Italy. He said Fitch's downgrade "doesn't change the situation" and that the credit rating agencies "are a bit like a herd, moving in the same direction in the same moment." Rather like Spain and Italy's economies are heading in the same direction, in the same moment, then.

3.39pm: The Wall Street Journal is reporting that US bank exposure to the European debt crisis could be as much as $640bn, nearly 5% of total US banking assets, according to recent research papers written for Congress.

Federal reserve chairman Ben Bernanke was reassuring Congress only this week that US bank's were not endangered by the woes of the euro zone. But according to the Journal (subscription required) two different reports provided to federal lawmakers last month "suggest the debt problems of Greece, Ireland, Portugal, Italy, and Spain constitute a "serious risk" to the European banking system, particularly German, French, and UK banks, which have close ties to US banks.""Given that U.S. banks have an estimated loan exposure to German and French banks in excess of $1.2 trillion and direct exposure to the PIIGS (Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece and Spain) valued at $641 billion, a collapse of a major European bank could produce similar problems in US institutions," the research service warned lawmakers.

3.48pm:Rodent asks:

Is Fitch the messenger or the message?

I wonder if the rating firms aren't a large part of the problem rather than the unbiased agents of truth they claim to be.

Good point my verminous friend, it's tough to know who to trust more, a ratings agency or an Italian government accountant.

4.04pm: Another up and down day on Wall Street has come to an end. And its a bummer. The three day winning streak has been snapped with all the major markets ending the day down.

The Dow ended at 11,103.58, down 0.18%, the Nasdaq ended at 2,479.35, a fall of 1.1% and the S&P 500 ended down at 1,155.48, 0.81% lower.

Early enthusiasm for slightly less depressing jobs figures seems to have been wiped out by fresh fears over Europe as Fitch moved to downgrade Italy and Spain.

The Dow is up 2% for the week - so it's not all doom and gloom. But no one is cracking out the champagne. Time for all those Wall Streeters to change into casual clothes and sneak past the protestors in Zuccotti Park.

4.17pm: So that's it – another week of hope and fear on Wall Street. And what have we learned?

•Employment is weak in the US – but at the moment it looks like things are steadying themselves rather than getting worse.

• Spain and Italy are great places to go on holiday and rubbish places to invest your money.

• And Silvio Berlusconi likes to crack a joke, even in the darkest times. Sadly no one is laughing with him.